It’s strange how dreams can change on you… One moment Lesley was dropping into the darkness, in complete free-fall. The next, he was standing on his own two feet in a brightly lit area. Very brightly lit, in fact, glaringly so. Squinting around him, he rummaged in his pockets briefly, pulling out an ordinary-seeming pair of shades. Setting them in place over his eyes, he looked around again. Paused, lifted the shades away, set them back down, lifted… No difference. The light was the same uncomfortable level in either case.
Sighing, Lesley simply put them back in his pocket and tried to look around without tearing up too much. From the looks of things, he was in some sort of shopping mall, lines of stores down both sides extending somewhere towards infinity, one single, very long skylight in the ceiling, letting in all that blaring light. Glancing over the side of a nearby railing, Lesley could see the mall was a three-story job, with him on the top floor, and doing a lot of business. People crowded pretty much everywhere, milling about in that semi-random pattern of life. Trying to focus on the people, he didn’t recognize a single face. Wherever D.J., Lizzie, and Dabbler were, it wasn’t here.
The people seemed pretty non-descript, really. Bland, in fact. Not that they all looked the same, other than being all human of various shapes, sizes, and shades, but faces seemed to slide off the memory without staying. They also didn’t seem to mind all the light, or the noise, or the smell. Ugh, the smell. Perfumes, colognes, deodorant, a dozen different kinds of food, and underneath all that the unmistakable scent of humanity. It was kinda like being hit in the nose with a 2x4.
Glancing around a bit more, Lesley muttered to himself, “Well, he never was much of a people person.” Checking both ways down the lines of stores, he picked one direction and started walking. But I don’t see how this could qualify as an ‘inner demon’… Or at least, not one we need to deal with…
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Mon Sep 13 20:12:08 2004
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